2 Scenario Based Data Structure and Algorithm Design Interview Questi... https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2017/03/2-practical-data-structure-algo...

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2 Scenario Based Data Structure and Algorithm Design Interview Questions from
Investment Banks

No doubt that Data structure and algorithms are

an integral part of any Programming job
interview, including Java, C++ or any other
programming language. In fact Data structure
and algorithms are quite a favorite one and all
top notch companies including Google,
Microsoft, Amazon and investment banks like
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Barclays, Morgan Follow by Email
Stanley or J.P. Morgan focus extensively on data
structure and algorithms, while hiring both Email address... Submit

senior and mid-level developers in Java, C++,

and C# positions. When I shared some
traditional, popular, and more frequently asked questions on Data structure and Algorithms in
my earlier article, I received a lot of feedback to share some practical, scenario-based
questions on data structure e.g. which kind of data structure will you use in a particular
scenario and why.

This sounds me really interesting, because this not only test your knowledge of existing data
structure e.g. array, linked list, trees, graphs, stack, queue, ring buffer, Map but also test how
well you can apply and use this data structure in a given situation, and in some cases, can
you come up with a new innovative data structure.

Of course, classical questions on data structure e.g. finding middle element of linked list in
one pass or internal working of HashMap still matters, but these new questions will give you
more fun and edge while preparing for Java, C++ or C# developer roles.

Inter v iew Questions

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introduction, let's see some good, practical questions from data
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spr ing inter view questions (19)
ture will you use to implement a Limit Order Book? and Why?
database inter view questions (16)
ed mostly on investment banking Java interviews. Sometimes it's also
ser vlet inter view questions (15)
ented design question, which involved detailed design and coding. Let
Pr ogr amming inter view question (6)
of a Limit order book, especially for those programmers who are not from

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financial services firms or not familiar with stock trading. hiber nate inter view questions (6)

In Stock trading, exchanges like NYSE (NewYork Stock Exchange) maintains an order book for Best of Jav ar ev isited
every security or stock which is traded on their exchange e.g. GOOG, which is a symbol of How Spr ing MVC w or ks inter nally?
Google's stock. There are mainly two kinds of orders customers can send, a buy order, and a How to design a vending machine in Java?
sell order. When we use Limit Price, which means buy order with a limit price of $50 can be How HashMap w or ks in Java?
executed if it found a sell order of $50 or an order of lower price says $49, but it can not be Why Str ing is Immutable in Java?
executed with a sell order of price $51. Similarly, a sell order can execute for a price, which is 10 Ar ticles Ever y Pr ogr ammer Must Read
either equal to or higher than limit price. In general, a LIMIT order executes if it found a How to conver t lambda ex pr ession to method
specified price or better price(lower in the case of a buy, and higher in the case of sell). r efer ence in Java 8?
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Orders are executed in first come first serve basis, so exchange also maintains a time priority. How Synchr onization w or ks in Java?
Now, let's see the flow, an order comes to exchange, exchange looks order book for that 10 tips to w or k fast in Linux
symbol, if it found a match it executes order otherwise, it adds that order at the end of a price 5 Books to impr ove Coding Skills
queue, which represents time priority, head of the queue represent the order with highest time
priority i.e. the order which comes before all the order below it. Jav a Tutor ials

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Now our goal is to perform above operation as quickly as possible. If you look at closely, it FIX pr otocol tutor ial (15)

involves finding opposite order of matching the price, which is equal to or less/greater than Java Cer tification OCPJP SCJP (25)
specified price, removing the order from order book if it matched or canceled, adding order java collection tutor ial (73)
into order book at an appropriate place if not matched. java IO tutor ial (28)
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Follow ers (4762) Next

In all these operations, traversing is a key, which hints towards binary search tree data
structure. If we use a Binary Tree for storing order, we can find a matching order using binary Follow
search which is of order O(log2N), not quite fast as O(1) but still decent one. Subscr ibe to Download the E-book

Similarly adding and removing orders will also cost that much time, because they involve
traversal. Now in order to tackle different symbol, since the order of one symbol can not match
to order of another symbol, an OrderBook must be associated with a symbol. This is just a
basic idea, without going into exact requirement i.e. methods required to be supported by an
order book.

Btw, If you are not familiar with tree data structure and its variants e.g. binary search tree,
balanced tree-like AVL and Red-Black tree and Tries then I suggest you first read a good book
on Data Structure and Algorithms e.g. Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen

Do w nlo ad Building a REST API w ith

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class OrderBook{ Failed to connect to queue manager - WebSpher e

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fields...
public execute(Order ord){
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//find matching order
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}
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problem and choose a particular data structure. Remember choice of data structure is mainly Tutor ia...
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driven by the operation performed on that e.g. We used Queue instead of Stack here, because
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the order which comes first, should execute first (FIFO) if price matches.
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I have used a tree data structure because we need to find either specified price or a better Par sing Lar ge JSON Files using Jackson
price, which involves search between different price. Remember, we have not yet considered Str eaming A...

concurrency, thread-safety and all those things which are quite important while designing 3 w ays to Find Fir st Non Repeated Char acter in
a S...
structures for high volume, low latency application, but that's a topic for separate discussion.
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Str uctur e ...
Here our goal is to focus on choosing right data-structure. Also, if you think the binary tree is
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not a right data structure for representing a limit order book, you can definitely share your Wi...
thoughts and solution with us. We will see if it solves the problem with better performance in Differ ence betw een WeakRefer ence vs
terms of time and development effort. SoftRefer ence ...
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w ...
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2) Which data structure will you choose to store Market data? and Why?
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This is another data structure questions, which is asked in various wall street firms e.g. Ar r ...
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not be familiar with Market data, Let me brief about Market data and key things which will help PL/SQL?
us to approach the problem. In simple word, Market data are the live prices of different stocks 5 w ays to Conver t Java 8 Str eam to List -
at a given moment. Since prices move very quickly in Exchange, given volume of high- Ex ample,...

frequency trading and electronic trading, market data quickly become stale. 2 Ex amples of Str eams w ith Collections in Java 8
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data for that purpose. Now this gives us an idea, that as soon as we receive an update, we Can You Over load or Over r ide Static methods in
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Since Market data is processed by another thread and it subsequently removed from the
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store, we need to also think of a data structure which provides consume kind of functionality.
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Initially, I thought of using an unbounded Queue for storing market data, which is
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simultaneously processed by another thread, typical producer-consumer design, but this No...
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LinkedHashMap you can get your order of insertion, and being
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That's all on this list of Practical Data structure and algorithm questions for Java, C++, and 10 ex ample of chmod command in UNIX Linux

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improving your own solution, almost always create a better impression during interviews. How to Incr ease Console Buffer Size in Eclipse
IDE...

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linked list, array, queue, and stacks. Stay tuned, I will share few more such data structure
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questions as and when I come across, mean while you are always welcome to share
in ...
something similar. Till then you can also use problems given in Algorithm Design Manual by
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